


and the wine stains hide the tears

by darlingofdots



Series: repeat performance [2]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Multi, POV Second Person, needless to say none of this is healthy, sometimes you need to seduce god so a teenager can kill your brother Lyctor, the Unholy Threesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:26:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27596135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingofdots/pseuds/darlingofdots
Summary: “I don’t hate Cristabel,” he said. His voice was a low rumble in your ears. For a moment, you permitted yourself to forget the rest of the room. He added: “Dear, I barely hate you.”You leaned into the kiss with wild, tumultuous abandon. You kissed Augustine like an addict relapsing after long sobriety, like a woman resigned, like a lamb to the slaughter.Mercy hates sexy parties.
Relationships: Augustine the First/John Gaius | Necrolord Prime/Mercymorn the First
Series: repeat performance [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2026058
Comments: 7
Kudos: 81





	and the wine stains hide the tears

You still felt the sting in your knuckles where you had punched the Saint of Patience. The burst of thanergy you had channelled through your fist still tingled in your dermis, pleasantly, to remind you of the immense satisfaction of knocking Augustine’s teeth from his smug mouth. The sensation fuelled you all throughout dinner; that and the _several_ glasses of wine you had drunk, to fortify yourself. At some point your hair had stopped cooperating, because you had taken a moment to pluck three strategic pins from the smooth and elegant coils, so it had come loose when you turned your head just so. You had considered pushing one of the delicate straps of silk off your shoulder so your dress would cling invitingly to your breast, but had dismissed the idea as too obvious right before Augustine loosened his tie and sat there in his shirtsleeves.

God sat between you, the sleeves of His shirt — which you recognised as the one He wore on special occasions, functionally identical to every one of His other plain, black shirts — rolled up to His elbows, and His top button was undone and His head was bare, and He was astonishingly, profoundly inebriated. He was very concerned with the infant he had assigned to you to teach, evangelising on the virtues of drinking water, as though that would do any good. The _other_ infant, with her garishly gilded right appendage, sat next to Augustine, hanging on every word from his lips like a puppy eager for a treat, and you were so _weary_ , so endlessly fed up with the entire evening, that you almost welcomed the Saint of Patience finally turning the conversation to the topic of your dead cavaliers.

You raised your glass to Cristabel and drained it, praying you might choke on wine like you had choked on her, and then His fingers touched yours and you said, indignantly, “I’m not drunk!!”

“I’d never think it,” he said, as if to soothe your ruffled feathers, and you gazed into His dying-star eyes only long enough to remember why you were here before you turned away.

You felt both relief and dread when Gideon finally stalked out of the room. Relief, because you always found his presence discomfiting, because he always made you feel like you were trying to live up to something, and dread because his exit chimed in the next abominable act of this whole horrid affair. You glumly began to comb out your hair so it fell in a lush curtain around your shoulders, plucking out the remaining pins and secreting them under your napkin for later retrieval. You so hated having to tease out the tangled nests afterwards, and you learnt from your mistakes. You said, “Here’s a better toast… To the Emperor of the Nine Houses. To the Resurrector. To my God!”

“To Emperor John Gaius, the Necrolord Prime!” Augustine echoed, draining his glass.

“I’m not going to drink to _myself_ ,” God said, “I’m not the best man who ever lived, but I’m not quite that much of a narcissist.”

You licked a drop of too-sweet wine from your lips and said, with an intensity you saved for occasions such as this: “You _are_ the best man who ever lived.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Augustine, and then you had to sit through five minutes of masculine posturing before you lost your patience.

“You’re wrong, Augustine,” you sang, your chin in your hand. “You still hate Cristabel… You hated my cavalier long before what she did.” It barely even stung. You had numbed yourself with enough alcohol that you barely even felt it. You begged her forgiveness, anyway.

“Do I, Mercy?” Augustine said, trembling slightly. “God help me, I don’t think I do.”

You said, “Look me in the eyes and say that.”

The first Saint to serve the King Undying pushed to his feet and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief again, and although God had half-risen too, a hand on his arm as if to stop him, he moved to crouch next to your chair so you could look into the ashen depths of his brother’s eyes. You braced yourself — flooded your system with oxygen, metabolised some of the alcohol in your bloodstream, licked your lips.

“Joy,” he said, “what’s done is done. They’re dead. The crime is punished. I don’t hate Cristabel.”

Your face held no expression. “Say it again.”

“I don’t hate Cristabel,” he said. His voice was a low rumble in your ears. For a moment, you permitted yourself to forget the rest of the room. He added: “Dear, I barely hate you.”

You leaned into the kiss with wild, tumultuous abandon. You kissed Augustine like an addict relapsing after long sobriety, like a woman resigned, like a lamb to the slaughter. He swept his tongue into your mouth and you sighed into him, once, before setting off another spark in his gustatory cells to push him away. Thankfully, the Saint of Patience took the hint, extracted himself, and turned his attentions on the King Undying, who had vaguely muttered something and now stood by His chair looking a little lost. You swayed to your feet, not quite as unperturbed as you had hoped, waited your turn, and tangled your hands into the front of God’s shirt to pull Him down.

God’s kiss was sin and redemption at once. He groaned at the touch of your lips and set His hands to your hips to lift you bodily on the edge of the table, somehow finding the space for you to sit amid the carnage that was the remains of dinner, and you tilted your head so your hair cascaded down your back in a thick sheet of peach-coloured waves and watched Augustine rake his teeth over the column of God’s throat, and you hated this, and him, and yourself, so you flung out a hand for a glass, any glass, and tossed back a mouthful of stale wine.

The Saint of Patience’s fingers fumbled with the buttons on the front of God’s shirt while he was still mouthing at his neck, and God’s hands were on you, His thumbs pressing into the crease between your hips and your thighs, and you reached for your hypothalamus and wrung a trickle of dopamine from it to kick your tired body into action. Augustine had managed to push God’s shirt down His shoulders and you reached out to trail the edges of your fingernails down His sternum, watched him shiver, repeated the movement with just enough pressure to leave, for the merest second, scratches in His skin, hot and angry before they faded. Behind Him, Augustine fitted himself to the Emperor’s back, one arm wrapped around His waist, and kissed a line from His jaw to His shoulder while God tangled one of His hands in your hair and drew you, roughly, to Him. He tasted like wine and lemons and the spark of lightning the atmosphere of a dying planet and you drank Him in in greedy, breathless gulps. His had been the first lips you kissed as a disciple of the Resurrection; you would remember the shape of them on yours a myriad beyond eternity.

The hem of your dress had bunched up when He lifted you, sitting just below your knees now but still too tight around your thighs for you to spread your legs and run the soles of your feet down the backs of His knees. You pushed at Augustine’s arm to make him let go so you could drag God’s shirt from His body and toss it carelessly into the room; your perception had narrowed to you and Him and Augustine and the cold hard edge of the table digging into your flesh and the harsh brightness of the overhead lamp that did _nothing_ for your complexion.

You met Augustine’s gaze and made sure he knew in no uncertain terms that if he felt the need to drag you into his sordid schemes he better make it worth your while, which made him quirk a greying eyebrow at you and whisper something in God’s ear, and then He pushed the straps of your dress down your shoulders and His hands cupped your breasts, His holy thumbs caressing your nipples, and you arched your back and pressed yourself into His touch, shamefully seeking contact, because despite your best efforts the soft animal of your body continued to _want_.

You shoved aside a bowl and some cutlery so you could lean back on one arm, then reached for the belt of God’s faded black trousers, dancing your knuckles over the line between leather and skin, mimicking the rhythm of His touch, before dipping your hand into the waistband and relishing in His sharp intake of breath. Augustine took God by the shoulders and pushed, and then lifted you just enough to push your dress up to your hips, and then his hands were on the core of you and your hands on God and His hands wrestling with the front of Augustine’s trousers —

At some point, God was on his knees in front of you and you did not think it heresy, just fitted your palm to the curve of His skull and sank into the ecstasy of His tongue on you, and then you watched the Saint of Patience, with his head thrown back in wild, concentrated ecstasy, fuck God on the dining room table while you carded your fingers through His hair and kissed him so hard you felt the surge of thanergy knitting your bruised lips back together, and the walls echoed with your sighs mingling into symphonies and sweat and sex and since you were damned already, could you not have this?

But of course not. The sudden shriek of the fire alarm startled you out of your skin so abruptly you almost impaled yourself on the tines of a carving fork. Out of all of three of you, you were the least undressed, you just had to tear your dress back into place, but there was a stain of your lipstick on Augustine’s collar and none of the buttons of God’s shirt were in the right buttonholes, but you jabbed your finger at the security panel to figure out where that horrid shrieking noise was coming from while they sorted themselves out.

When you arrived at the incinerator, it turned out the infant hadn’t even managed to kill Gideon. Harrowhark mumbled something about pulling him from the flames, and the moving body of your dead sister Saint, and Gideon dumbly stared into space, and the whole thing was a grotesque, awful, miserable _farce_. If you had not still been a little flustered, if you had taken the time to flush the oxytocin and norepinephrine from your system, you would have wrapped your hands around Augustine’s throat and strangled him on the spot. You cornered him, later, outside the quarters that ought to have been Anastasia’s, and called him a vile, condescending son of a bitch. That helped, but it wasn’t enough. It never was.

**Author's Note:**

> Massive thank you to the discord crew for encouraging/enabling me. I tried about seven different new things with this, and I would never have been brave enough.


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